George Washington's Blog: Anomalies in Anthrax Suicide Story

My take on the anthrax attacks is that they were perpetrated by the same terrorists who planned and executed the 9/11 attacks which were planned to be coordinated with the Patriot Act (not to mention the invasion of Iraq). The two Senators who received the deadly anthrax letters, Tom Daschle, Senate Majority Leader, and Pat Leahy, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, had key roles in finally allowing the Patriot Act to pass in the form Cheney wanted.

If there were anything resembling accountability in this country, it would have been a scandal that there was no investigation for almost 7 years after the relevant strain of anthrax was linked to Ft Detrick, MD. .

Interesting that I found some relevant information regarding the Bruce Edwards Ivins suicide/anthrax attacks on 911blogger.com. The coverup is so clear that even NPR quoted at least two people who claimed that there was no way that Ivins was guilty of the attacks. Also, doesn't the news that Ivins was suicidal and homicidal seem a bit strange in a scientist in such a responsible position? How did the US get the information? What evidence is there that such stories are true?
Ronald


Government Tries to Bury Anthrax Story
by George Washington's Blog

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2008/08/anthrax-attacks-were-not-e...

The government is trying to bury the 2001 anthrax attack scandal (the anthrax came from a U.S. military base) by claiming that one of the key suspects - Bruce E. Ivins - was a "lone nut" who committed suicide. Case closed.
There are just a couple of loose ends:
Ivins "was actually part of a team that helped the government investigate the anthrax attacks after Sept. 11"
"The attacks were not entirely unexpected", according to a journalist, who was urged soon after 9/11 to take cipro by a high-level government official (confirmation that government employees started taking Cipro before the Anthrax attacks here). As Michael Fury put it, "So even if Ivins was involved, how would "a high government official" know that a rogue bioweapons scientist was going to "go postal" with anthrax if that "high government official" was not himself involved?" (and see this comment by Atrios)
Why did the anthrax letters attempt to link 9/11 and the anthrax attack and pretend to be from radical Muslims and be anti-America and anti-Israel, if they really came from a disgruntled American?
Why did the U.S. government - including, apparently, the people responsible for sending the anthrax letters - falsely claim that the materials in the anthrax prove that it was manufactured in Iraq? Would a disgruntled "lone nut" be motivated to concoct a false justification for invading Iraq?

Read more:

http://911blogger.com/node/16892

or
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2008/08/anthrax-attacks-were-not-e...

911 Feature Film: The Reflecting Pool: Trailer, Synopsis; NYC Schedule July 2008

The NYT trashed it, so maybe it's struck a nerve. --RB

An open letter by the writer/director to Nathan Lee, the NY Times movie critic of “The Reflecting Pool.” (includes a link to the Times review and to several comments about
http://911blogger.com/node/16607


Here's the trailer. Looks interesting.
http://www.reflectingpoolfilm.com/reflectingpooltrailer.htm


SYNOPSIS
(by ReflectingPool.com)
An investigation of the 9/11 events by a Russian-American journalist and a father of a 9/11 victim implicates the US government in the attacks.

ALEX PROKOP (Jarek Kupsc), a successful journalist, receives a rare 9/11 video tape revealing new information about the attack. The footage was sent by PAUL COOPER (Joseph Culp), a driven researcher, whose daughter died on 9/11. Sensing a good story, Prokop travels with Cooper to New York and Washington, DC, where they uncover suppressed information implicating the US Government in the attacks. As Cooper introduces Prokop to key eye-witnesses, the façade of the "official story" begins to crumble. Prokop hears accounts of underground explosions in the Twin Towers moments before their collapse and discovers that the firm providing WTC security was run by the President's brother.

We follow Alex and Cooper as they investigate the inexplicable collapse of the 47-story WTC Building Seven, disprove the implausible airliner "attack" on the Pentagon, and uncover the illegal destruction of physical evidence from Ground Zero.

The pressure builds as the FBI intimidates Alex's editor, McGUIRE, (Lisa Black) to reveal key sources – while the magazine's corporate investors threaten to kill the entire story. Plagued by the ghosts of his Communist childhood and trying to uphold the independence of American journalism, Alex's search for the truth leads to a dangerous and shocking realization!

THE REFLECTING POOL is an intense, sobering investigation into the most controversial tragedy of our time. Drawn from established sources and based on verifiable facts, THE REFLECTING POOL is a thought-provoking study of a search for truth and the profound consequences of not looking for it any further than the nightly news.
***
JULY 11-16 & 18 (7pm & 9pm)
NEW YORK CITY

Pioneer Theater
155 East 3rd St
New York, NY
(212) 591-0434

No shows on Thursday July 17. Filmmakers will attend for Q & A! For more information:
www.twoboots.com/pioneer

Glenn Greenwald: The Lawless Surveillance State

Another bulls eye from the indefatigable Glenn Greenwald. I've mercilessly cut out the bulk of his blog entry for space reasons. So all that is left is some notion of his focus and enough for me to emphasize or bring up an issue or three.

For Greenwald's complete blog entry, visit: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/index.html

I've kept his reference to "the strange criminal prosecution of former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, who refused to comply with several government requests to enable warrantless spying, after which he was prosecuted."
Why haven't we heard more about this? Has Democracy Now covered this case? Is anyone in Congress interested in finding out more about what would seem to be the political prosecution of the only CEO apparently who has stood up to Bush-Cheney on warranties spying of all our telephone and internet communications?

I've included the issue of Harry Reid making sure that the telecoms get their amnesty. Greenwald doesn't tackle the question of why Reid is abetting Bush-Cheney on this issue. Like the whole "war on terror" could it be the government's choice of victims?
[As I write, the Senate is "debating" as per Harry Reid's cave-in -- which means that the administration will get the retroactive amnesty it desires.]

Also, Greenwald's last sentence in the selection below caught my eye.
As but the latest example, read Mark Benjamin's superb though now-numbingly-familiar account of how we tortured Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah for 19 months and then just let him go once we realized that -- like so many others we've detained and tortured -- he was guilty of nothing.

What's my quibble? Regular readers will have guessed. If the State is responsible for virtually all the high profile (and a great deal of the low profile) terror actions of the last decade or so such as 9/11, London, Madrid, Jordan Hotel bombing, Oklahoma City bombing, African Embassy bombings, Tel Aviv Disco bombing and on and on, then the detention and torture of its victims like Mohamed Bashmilah was done with the full knowledge that he was guilty only of being chosen as a patsy, one more victim.
Ronald***

Selections from
Glenn Greenwald
December 16, 2007
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/index.html
The Lawless Surveillance State

There are several vital points raised by the new revelations in The New York Times that "the N.S.A.'s reliance on telecommunications companies is broader and deeper than ever before" and includes both pre-9/11 efforts to tap without warrants into the nation's domestic communications network as well as the collection of vast telephone records of American citizens in the name of the War on Drugs. The Executive Branch and the largest telecommunications companies work in virtually complete secrecy -- with no oversight and no notion of legal limits -- to spy on Americans, on our own soil, at will.
[snip]
That's precisely why our political class is about to bestow amnesty on telecoms which broke multiple laws in how they enabled the government to spy on us, even though what the telecoms did -- on purpose and for years -- is unquestionably illegal. Our political leaders in both parties plainly want this limitless surveillance to continue, and they don't think that telecoms do anything wrong even when they work with the government in spying on Americans in ways that are against the law.

And they're saying that explicitly. The legislation jointly created and about to be enacted by Jay Rockefeller, Dick Cheney, Congressional Republicans and Harry Reid -- with a vital assist from the Jane-Harman-led "Blue Dogs" in the House -- is all designed to conceal and protect this state of affairs and to enable it to grow.

In mid-October, numerous documents were made publicly available in the strange criminal prosecution of former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, who refused to comply with several government requests to enable warrantless spying, after which he was prosecuted. Those documents detailed the unbelievably extensive and secret cooperation between the federal government and large telecoms in creating domestic spying programs. [snip]...

It's the same process that led our political class to decide astoundingly that it would do nothing upon learning that the President also broke the law for years in how he ordered spying on American citizens. The Washington Post's Congressional reporter Jonathan Weisman recognized on Friday the indispensable role the Senate Majority Leader is playing in all of this:
San Francisco: Why is Harry Reid ignoring the Judiciary Committee's FISA bill and bringing up the SSCI bill? Is telecom amnesty that important to Sen. Reid? If so, why?

Jonathan Weisman: A very good question. Reid has said he will bring up the Intel Committee bill, then allow advocates of the Judiciary Committee bill to bring up theirs as a substitute. That's a big blow, since it will take 60 votes even to consider a vote on the Judiciary version.

Reid says he opposes retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies, but he seems to be stacking the decks for it.
[snip],,,

Ultimately, what is most significant about all of this is how the most consequential steps our government takes -- such as endless expansion of its domestic spying programs with literally no oversight and constraints of law -- occur with virtually no public debate or awareness.

[snip]...

The very nature of our country and our government fundamentally transforms step by step, with little opposition. We all were inculcated with the notion that what distinguished our free country from those horrendous authoritarian tyrannies, both right and left, of the Soviet bloc, Latin America and the Middle East were things like executive detentions, torture, secret prisons, spying on their own citizens, unprovoked invasions of sovereign countries, and exemptions from the law for the most powerful -- precisely the abuses which increasingly characterize our government and shape our political values. As but the latest example, read Mark Benjamin's superb though now-numbingly-familiar account of how we tortured Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah for 19 months and then just let him go once we realized that -- like so many others we've detained and tortured -- he was guilty of nothing.

For more, visit:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/index.html

Robert Sheer: CIA Tapes Destruction Raises 9/11 Issues

This is a very important article (thanks to JM for the pointer). Scheer connects the dots in the first few paragraphs in directions that I doubt will be seen elsewhere in the mainstream left or right media. He surprisingly raises questions that go to the heart of the 9/11 official story and its aftermath,the endless "war on terror" that, as he puts it, is bankrupting us (and the world, he might have added) financially and morally.

One of the implications of the CIA's destruction of the interrogation tapes is that the official narrative of 9/11 cannot be corroborated; but neither can it can be contradicted. Thus we have more circumstantial evidence, this time in the mainstream, that there are issues with the 9/11 official story.

Similarly, we can more clearly see now some of the motivation for not allowing the Guantanomo detainees due process. If they were allowed their day in court, what would be the odds that the government could produce evidence that there are some "really bad guys" there. If 9/11 was an inside job, then the bad guys aren't inside cages in Guantanamo.

For my money, Sheer could have ended his article after the first 5 paragraphs or else followed up on some of these issues.. When he goes onto the question of what Harman and Pelosi should have done after their "briefings," he's obscuring the main point and mixing up different issues, and when seen in context, perhaps made unreasonable demands on ordinary politicians. Undoubtedly Harman and Pelosi, and Rockefeller and Feinstein have plenty to answer for, but let's focus
on the major criminals in the executive.
Ronald
***
Waterboarding Our Democracy
By Robert Scheer
Truthdig
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_121207H.shtml
Wednesday 12 December 2007

When the CIA destroyed those prisoner interrogation videotapes, was it also destroying the truth about 9/11? After all, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, the basic narrative of what happened on that day-and the definition of the enemy in this war on terror that George W. Bush launched in response to the tragedy-comes from the CIA's account of what those prisoners told their torturers. The commission was never allowed to interview the prisoners, or speak with those who did, and was instead forced to rely on what the CIA was willing to relay.

On the matter of the existence of the tapes, we know the CIA lied, not only to the 9/11 Commission but to Congress as well. Given that the Bush administration has for six years refused those prisoners any sort of public legal exposure, why should we believe what we've been told about what may turn out to be the most important transformative event in our nation's history? On the basis of what the CIA claimed the tortured prisoners said, President Bush launched a "Global War on Terrorism" (GWOT), an endless war that threatens to bankrupt our society both financially and morally.

How important to the 9/11 Commission Report were those "key witnesses"? Check out the disclaimer on Page 146 about the commission's sourcing of the main elements laid out in its narrative:
Chapters 5 and 7 rely heavily on information obtained from captured al Qaeda members. ... Assessing the truth of statements by these witnesses ... is challenging. Our access to them has been limited to the review of intelligence reports based on communications received from the locations where the actual interrogation took place. We submitted questions for use in the interrogations, but had no control over whether, when, or how questions of particular interest would be asked. Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting. We were told that our requests might disrupt the sensitive interrogation process.

Videos were made of those "sensitive" interrogations, which were accurately described as "torture" by one of the agents involved, John Kiriakou, in an interview with ABC News. Yet when the 9/11 Commission and federal judges specifically asked for such tapes, they were destroyed by the CIA, which then denied their existence.

Of course our president claims he knew nothing about this whitewash, and he may be speaking the truth, since plausible deniability seems to be the defining leadership style of our commander in chief. But what about those congressional leaders who were briefed on the torture program as early as 2002? That includes Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi, who has specialized in heartfelt speeches condemning torturers in faraway places like China.

Pelosi press aide Brendan Daly told me that The Washington Post report on her CIA briefing was "overblown" because Pelosi, then the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, thought the techniques described, which the CIA insists included waterboarding, were merely planned and not yet in use. Pelosi claimed that "several months later" her successor as the ranking Democrat, Jane Harman, D-Calif., was advised that the techniques "had in fact been employed." Harman wrote a classified letter to the CIA in protest, and Pelosi "concurred." Neither went public with her concerns.

Harman told The Washington Post, "I was briefed, but the information was closely held to just the Gang of Four. I was not free to disclose anything." The "Gang of Four" is an insider reference to the top members of the House and Senate intelligence committees and not to the thugs who ran Mao's China during the Cultural Revolution.

Not only did the congressional Gang of Four fail to inform the public about the use of torture by our government, but it also kept the 9/11 Commission in the dark. Pelosi testified before the commission on May 22, 2003, but uttered not a word of caution about the methods used. However, more than two years later, on Nov. 16, 2005, Pelosi stated correctly that on the basis of her "many years on the intelligence committee," she knew that "[t]he quality of intelligence that is collected by torture is ... uncorroborated and it is worthless."

Having admired Pelosi for decades, I hope I am missing something here. If she and the others in the know have another version of these events it's time to come clean. As matters now stand, they not only concealed torture but, more significantly, they abetted the waterboarding of our democracy.

Morgan Reynolds: Kevin Ryan on WTC Collapse --Fire NOT!

For those who may be confused about how the WTC Towers collapsed and would like to see credible evidence offered concisely, here is Morgan Reynolds’s two page account, which he presents by way of Kevin Ryan, an environmental engineer who was



the site manager of Environmental Health Laboratories, a division of Underwriters Laboratories, which had certified the steel components used in construction of the WTC towers for their ability to withstand fires. In November of 2004, Ryan wrote a letter to Dr. Frank Gayle, a metallurgist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Ryan’s letter challenged the preliminary NIST metallurgical findings on the WTC collapses, saying: “This story just does not add up. If steel from those buildings did soften or melt, I’m sure we can all agree that this was certainly not due to jet fuel fires of any kind, let alone the briefly burning fires in those towers.”

Explaining his reasons for this statement, Ryan said:

[S]teel components were certified to ASTM E119…[T]he steel applied met those specifications,. The time temperature curves for this standard require the samples to be exposed to temperatures around 2,000⁰ F for several hours… [E]ven un-fireproofed steel will not melt until reaching red-hot temperatures of nearly 3,000⁰ F… [T]he buildings should have easily withstood the thermal stress caused by pools of burning jet fuel.

Therefore, the suggestion by one expert, “that 2,000⁰ F would melt the high-grade steel used in those buildings makes no sense at all.” Ryan even pointed out that Gayle himself suggested, “that the steel was probably exposed to temperatures of only about 500⁰ F (250⁰ C), which is what one might expect from a thermodynamic analysis of the situation.”


These findings were ignored, Ryan pointed out to Gayle, as the official summary effectively claimed.

that these low temperatures cause exposed bits of the building’s steel core to “soften and buckle.” Additionally this summary states that the perimeter columns softened, yet your findings make clear that “most perimeter panels (157 of 160) saw no temperature above 250⁰ C degrees.” To soften steel for the purpose of forging, normally temperatures need to be above 1,1000 C,

four times higher. Ryan thereby rejected NIST’s implication that such low temperatures were able not only to “soften the steel in a matter of minutes, but lead to rapid structural collapse.”

The absurdity of the official story about the WTC collapses being caused by fires weakening WTC steel is further exposed by another fact: “Corus Constructions Corporations performed extensive tests in multiple countries in which they subjected steel-framed carparks, which were uninsulated, to prolonged hydrocarbon fueled fires,” writes Jim Hoffman, “and the highest temperatures they recorded in any of the steel beams or columns was a mere 360 C. At that temperature, structural steel loses only about 1 percent of its strength.” Besides the fact that steel conducts heat extremely well, so that the heat from the fire in any one part of one of the towers would have been quickly diffused throughout the rest of the building, the towers had redundant strength on the order of 600 percent. Another problem with the official story is that if the fires were hot enough to cause massive steel columns to buckle, some of the aluminum façade should have melted, given the fact that aluminum melts at less than half the temperature required to melt steel.

For these and many other reasons, the official theory about the collapse of the WTC buildings is physically impossible.

Morgan Reynolds, from “9/11, Texas A&M University, and Heresy,” in David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, eds., 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, (2007), pp. 112-113.

***

David Ray Griffin: No Airphones on Flight 77

No Airfones on Flight 77 - DRG on Jack Blood


Jack Blood Radio Show
Apr. 24, 2007
Interview with Prof. David Ray Griffin
Excerpt
Discussion of Prof. David Ray Griffin’s latest book on 9/11:
Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory

-------------------------------------------------------

Griffin: Let me tell you a new thing that most people don’t know. This was dug up by Rowland Morgan and Ian Henshall who wrote wrote the book, “9/11 Revealed.” ... it has to do with the alleged phone calls from Barbara Olson. Now you know and many of your listeners know that Ted Olson, her husband, who claims he got the call from her from………

Blood: They say he is going to be the new AG (Attorney General). I just had to thump that in. That’s the rumor going around [crosstalk]

Griffin: Yeah, more than likely. But he claims that he got this call from Barbara, his wife, from Flight 77 but he was unclear. First he would say it was from cell phone and then he would say, well no it was from one of the seat back phones. And he’s gone back and forth. So, it turns out now we know that cell phone calls were not possible. So, that makes everybody say, well sure maybe she did it on airfones. It turns out that particular Boeing, American Boeing 757 that Flight 77 was, was not equipped with airfones. This was a stunning development.

Blood: This was a stunning development. How come I haven’t heard that before, David?

Griffin: Because Roland’s book hasn’t got much attention. It’s a shame because it’s such a great book.

Blood: So it only could have been done by cell phone. They had no in flight phones on 77. Is that what you are saying?

Griffin: That’s right. And they checked and they double-checked and I quote all of their correspondence with American on that issue.

Blood: Did we have people on the record, David, saying that people used in-flight phones on that flight where there were no in-flight phones? Do we have them on the record trying to manipulate previous information to that level?

Griffin: Well, it was the call from Barbara Olson that some people have claimed was on the in-flight. I don’t know about other callers.



airfones | David Ray Griffin | Flight 77 | Jack Blood

(Edited for clarity.)

Jack Blood.com

You can D/L the April 24 Jack Blood show at http://nw0.info - follow the "radio" link. File is .ogg which is the http://www.videolan.org format - (VLC player).

This excerpt starts at the 54:27 mark.

Transcript by "ratcat" at LibertyForum.org;

Kevin Ryan's Battle for Truth Continues

Kevin Ryan's Battle for Truth Continues

If you are new to Kevin Ryan's story and work, go here:
http://www.ultruth.com/Kevin_Ryan.htm

Kevin Ryan

Kevin Ryan's legal battle with UL is still in the early stages, with UL's team of lawyers filing motions to dismiss the suit. If UL can be made to reveal information in the next stage of the legal battle, "disclosure", then Ryan can clear the record, and the truth can be revealed to a hungry pack of 9/11 skeptics across the nation and increasingly, the globe.

Please contribute to Ryan's Legal Defense Fund if you can:
http://www.ultruth.com/

If you are new to Kevin Ryan's story and work, go here:
http://www.ultruth.com/Kevin_Ryan.htm

Details on the case:

United States District Court, Southern District of Indiana
Cause No. 1:06-cv-1770-JDT-TAB
Judge John D. Tinder
Magistrate Judge Tim A. Baker

Be sure to check out Ryan's new piece:
Looking for Truth in Credentials: The WTC “Experts”

Alexander Cockburn: The persecution of Sami Al-Arian

Thanks to Alexander Cockburn for so economically and ably presenting the case and the details of the torture that the heroic Al-Arian is undergoing. From many of the details below, it's clear that the events of 9/11 and the attendant anti Muslim fervor are an essential element and an excuse for the behavior of many of the individuals involved in the torture, from the fanatic judge, to the several prosecutors and their teams, to the individual jailer/torturers. You'd think that this alone would encourage many on the left to look more closely into the (lack of) evidence implicating young Muslim terrorists. If only for the sake of Sami.

(For more on Stephen Emerson's anti-Muslim viciousness, check out the DESIP website below.)
Ronald
http://desip.igc.org

***

Weekend Edition
March 3 / 4, 2007

A Federal Witchhunt
The Persecution of Sami Al-Arian
www.counterpunch.org
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

One of the first big show trials here in the post-9/11 homeland was of a Muslim professor from Florida, now 49, Sami al-Arian. Pro-Israel hawks had resented this computer professor at the University of South Florida long before Atta and the hijackers flew their planes into the Trade towers, because they saw al-Arian, a Palestinian born in Kuwait of parents kicked out of their Homeland in 1948, as an effective agitator here for the Palestinian cause. As John Sugg, a fine journalist, then based in Tampa, who's followed al-Arian's tribulations for years, wrote in the spring of 2006 on this website:

"When was al-Arian important? More than a decade ago, when Israel's Likudniks in the United States, such as [Steven] Emerson, were working feverishly to undermine the Oslo peace process. No Arab voice could be tolerated, and al-Arian was vigorously trying to communicate with our government and its leaders. He was being successful, making speeches to intelligence and military commanders at MacDill AFB's Central Command, inviting the FBI and other officials to attend meetings of his groups. People were beginning to listen and to wonder why only one side of the Middle East debate was heard here. That was the reason for Al-Arian's political prosecution."

Now the United States is a country that is blessed by a constitution, a Bill of Rights and the rule of law, all of them upheld with degrees of enthusiasm that rise and fall according to sex, income and ethnicity. The fall is particularly drastic if your name is Arab, you publicly profess the justice of the Palestinian cause. Living in Florida doesn't help either.

At the direct instigation of Attorney General Ashcroft, the feds threw the book at al-Arian in February 2003. He was arrested with much fanfare and charged in a bloated terrorism and conspiracy case. He spent two and a half years in prison, in solitary confinement under atrocious conditions. To confer with his lawyers, he had to hobble half a mile, shackled hand and foot, his law files balanced on his back.

The six-month trial in US District Court in Tampa featured 80 government witnesses (including 21 from Israel) and 400 intercepted phone calls (the results of a decade of surveillance and half a million recorded calls). The government's evidence against Al-Arian consisted of speeches he gave, magazines he edited, lectures he presented, articles he wrote, books he owned, conferences he organized, rallies he attended, news he heard and websites no one accessed. One bit of evidence consisted of a conversation a co-defendant had with al-Arian in his dream. The defense rested without calling a single witness or presenting any evidence since the government's case rested entirely on First Amendment­protected activities.

The man presiding over al-Arian's trial was US District Court Judge James Moody, a creature from the dark lagoon of Floridian jurisprudence. Hospitable to all testimony from Israelis, Moody ruled that al-Arian and his associates could not say a single word about the military occupation or the plight of the Palestinian people. During closing arguments, the prosecution noted a document that mentioned UN Resolution 242. Moody nixed that on the grounds that it showed Palestinians in altogether too warm a light and therefore might tax the objectivity of the jurors. As Sugg wrote after that ruling, if MLK had been on trial in Judge Moody's courtroom for disturbing the peace, he wouldn't have been allowed to mention Jim Crow or lynchings.

In December 2005, despite Moody's diligence, the jury acquitted al-Arian of the most serious charges. On those remaining, the usual prosecutorial flailings under conspiracy statutes, jurors voted 10 to 2 for acquittal. Two co-defendants were acquitted completely. It was a terrible humiliation for the Justice Department, which had flung an estimated $50 million into the trial.

A jury split 10-2 in a defendant's favor doesn't augur well for conviction in a retrial. Indeed in the spring of 2006 the government declined to retry a wealthy Tampa businessman (the founder of Hooters) on tax evasion charges because the jury was hung 6 to 6, and therefore the proportion was too high to realistically expect a conviction during a retrial.

But the feds insisted they wanted to put al-Arian through the wringer again and -- prudently, given Moody's prejudice-al-Arian's lawyers urged him to make a plea and put an end to his ordeal and end the suffering of his family.

The terms of the plea agreement were in line with Al-Arian's long-standing contention, despite the government's accusations, that he never contributed to the violent actions of any organization. The government settled for a watered-down version of a single count of providing services to people associated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Statement of Facts in the agreement included only these innocuous activities:

(1) hiring an attorney for his brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najjar, during his deportation hearings in the late 1990s;

(2) filling out immigration forms for a resident Palestinian scholar from Britain; and

(3) not disclosing details of associations to a local reporter. (I remain completely baffled as to why it should be a crime to withhold information from a newspaper reporter.)

A central aspect of the plea agreement was an understanding that al-Arian would not be subject to further prosecution or called to cooperate with the government on any matter. The government recommended the shortest possible sentence.

On May 1, 2006, al-Arian came before Judge Moody for sentencing. Watching the proceedings Sugg, as he reported on the CounterPunch website, noted a smug air among the prosecutors. He also noted that Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez had arrived in the Tampa area five days earlier. Under the plea, al-Arian's sentence amounted to little more than time served, followed by his departure from the United States. But Judge Moody sentenced al-Arian to the maximum, using inflamed language about al-Arian having blood on his hands, a charge one juror said the jury emphatically rejected.

Now al-Arian faced eleven months more in prison, with release and deportation scheduled for April 2007. But the feds' appetite was far from slaked. In October, Gordon Kromberg, an assistant federal prosecutor in Virginia notorious as an Islamophobe, called al-Arian to testify before a grand jury investigating an Islamic think tank. The subpoena was a outright violation of al-Arian's April plea agreement and his attorneys filed a motion to quash it. The motion included affidavits by attorneys who participated in the negotiations attesting to the fact that "the overarching purpose of the parties' plea agreement was to conclude, once and for all, all business between the government and Dr. al-Arian." The defense lawyers insisted that al-Arian would never have entered a plea that left him vulnerable to government fishing expeditions.

Al-Arian's lawyers feared that their client was being set up for a perjury trap. Up in Virginia, Kromberg ranted to al-Arian's attorney about "the Islamization of America," while down in Tampa, Judge Moody ruled that federal marshals could drag al-Arian to Virginia to testify. On November 16, al-Arian was brought before the grand jury and placed in civil contempt for refusing to testify.

One month after al-Arian was placed in civil contempt, the grand jury term expired, so Kromberg promptly impaneled a new one. Al-Arian was again subpoenaed and again expressed his ethical stance against testifying. This judge also held him in contempt, which could prolong his imprisonment by up to 18 months.

Al-Arian, who is diabetic, then went on a hunger strike. February 26 marked the sixth week of his water-only hunger strike, in which he has lost 40 pounds and has grown considerably weaker. On the 23rd day of his hunger strike, Al-Arian collapsed and hit his head; he has since been moved to a federal prison medical facility in Butner, North Carolina.

On January 22, when Al-Arian appeared before Judge Lee on the charge of contempt, he had this to say about his recent treatment:

"In the past three weeks, I have been to four prisons. I spent fourteen days in the Atlanta penitentiary under 23-hour lockdown, in a roach and rat infested environment. On two occasions, rats shared my diabetic snack. When I was transported from Atlanta to Petersburg (Virginia) and from Petersburg to Alexandria, they allowed me only to wear a t-shirt in subfreezing weather during long walks. In the early morning, the Atlanta guard took my thermal undershirt which I purchased from the prison and threw it in the garbage and when I complained, he threatened to use a lockbox on my handcuffs which would make them extremely uncomfortable. In Petersburg, the guard asked me to take off my clean t-shirt and boxers and gave me dirty and worn out ones. When I complained, he told me to 'shut the f up.' And when I asked why he was treating me like that, he said 'because you're a terrorist.' When I further complained to the lieutenant in charge, he shrugged it off and said if I don't like it, I should write a grievance to the Bureau of Prisons. When I said he had the authority to give me clean clothes, he refused and said if I don't like it I should write a grievance to the Bureau of Prisons. During one of the airlifts, an air marshal further tightened my already tightened handcuffs, and asked me 'Why do you hate us?' I told him, 'I don't hate you.' He said, 'I know who you are, I've read your s-h-i-t.' These are examples of the government's harassment campaign against me that's been taking place for years because of my political beliefs."

Measured against José Padilla, a man driven insane on Rumsfeld's orders, I guess al-Arian is lucky. He's alive, and still sane, though getting weaker by the day. He needs all the support we can muster. Across the globe, where al-Arian's case has aroused much outrage, respect for the US commitment to Constitutional freedoms sinks lower still.

For information on the case, go to www.freesamialarian.com.